Commonwealth Avenue: The Greatest Failure of the Socialists

It’s a pretty typical winter’s day in Havilland today. The skies are grey, the wind is howling, and heavy rain is forecast for later on. But even though it’s not really a day for doing anything much, things could be gloomier. We could be in St.Charlie.

News broke on Tuesday that our esteemed Alexander Reinhardt, probably more so than anyone else the very architect of this community, was stepping down as President of the Federal Republic. Considering how much we all wanted him to get the position in the first place, it was a bit of a shock. This was a man who led the legendary November Revolution, stared down the might of Robert Lethler, and kept the community together through the tumultuous days of Yablokogate. Becoming President was the crowning achievement for this man of many accolades, and here he was relinquishing the post that had first been occupied by a little white dog.

And yet at the same time, it’s not really all that surprising. The St.Charlie of 2015 is not the St.Charlie of 2010 or even 2012. Its citizens have grown older and have turned their attention to real-life matters such as careers and relationships, and there’s nothing wrong or unusual about this. Reinhardt himself has things to take care of outside the borders of St.Charlie, and it is acceptable that if he no longer finds he can partake in micronationalism that he may retire, although this isn’t fully the case here. What has changed is the very nature of St.Charlie itself, and this is directly attributable to its government.

The great men and women who built St.Charlie in its early years – Schneider, Von Sternberg, Cassidy, Gallo della Loggia – have gone, replaced by (for the want of a better term) imports mainly from the old Republic of Atlantis, a separate nation with a very different mindset to the Federal Commonwealth.

My own opinion when news broke in 2012 that Atlantis had been admitted into St.Charlie was pessimistic, to say the least. By 2012, countries merged into St.Charlie to see out their final days in a sort of micronational hospice, or at least that’s the way it seemed to me. Nemkhavia and Egtavia both merged into the Republic and were never to be seen again, and that fate (I thought) was what lay in store for Atlantis. The country had never made much of a splash in the community besides some silly little civil war in late 2010, and to all intents and purposes it seemed like it was finished.

But lo and behold, come the 2013 election, here was Alexander Eastwood standing for election. It was practically a dead cert that he’d win, since the Nationals were in disarray and he at least had a track record of being a national leader. Here then was his chance to right the wrongs of the Alvisi regime and make the Eastwood Socialist government one of the community’s finest.

That didn’t happen. Instead, what little activity that was coming out of the nation came to a grinding halt, and soon we saw the beginnings of a sort of ‘Atlanticisation’ that started to replace this grand old nation with a nation it had absorbed only the year prior. The 2014 and 2015 elections only seemed to confirm what we all thought – St.Charlie was gone, and Atlantis had resurfaced.

And now we see today in the St.Charlian Observer that Eastwood is turning St.Charlie into a socialist Italophone nation and to hell with what we think. I mean, take a look at what the man himself said:

Many people abroad fear that the Federal Republic will become too italophone. I sincerely have the intention to give life to their fears. St.Charlie was founded by Italians and with Italian traditions, and while it holds citizens from all around the world, it cannot lose its traditions and cultural identity because of a minority that opposes them for no reason.

It’s not much of a stretch when you think about it.

St.Charlie was founded by Italians and with Italian traditions, nobody’s disputing that. But in the aftermath of the November Revolution, it became a nation not just for Italians, but for everybody. Britons, Germans, Italians, and no doubt countless other nationalities came together to create a nation for them, not a group of close-minded Italians with the gleam of change in their eye.

As Adam of Überstadt pointed out in his own opinion piece, the Observer, long held in high regard as the nation’s paper of record and one of the pillars of micronational journalism, is an English newspaper, with no sign of this changing any time soon. Even the Atlantis Post, possibly out of necessity more than anything else, is written in English. If Eastwood thinks St.Charlie should turn its back on this, he’s sorely mistaken.

In his rampant nationalistic crusade, Eastwood has forgotten St.Charlie’s heritage, and he’s also forgetting another fundamental point. St.Charlie is not his nation. He wasn’t there when the kingdom became a republic. He wasn’t there when the Socialist Party was given the green light to form. He wasn’t there for Observergate. No indeed, he was with another nation doing very little of any note. In his attempt to create a legacy for himself, he has trampled over St.Charlie’ heritage and what it stands for.

This rush to full Italian-ness has another impact – other nations will lose interest in St.Charlie. If the purge continues, the nation’s non-Italian citizens and regions will be (and feel) marginalised, and be more inclined to pack their things and leave for friendlier pastures, which is of course exactly what Eastwood wants. By the end of this revolution, St.Charlie will be little more than a pet project for Eastwood – Atlantis with a new name.

To bring this back to our esteemed Jacopo-senpai, it’s obvious why he had to go. Eastwood is hellbent on turning St.Charlie into Atlantis reborn, which means there can be no trace of the old way of life left. If this means the country’s greatest statesman has to be shown the door, then so be it. In the great New Socialist Revolution, there can be no exceptions. He is the old guard, and a Nationalist at that, therefore he does not fit into the New Atlantis Order and must go. It’s a sad end for a great man.

I’m not going to leave the Nationals out of this either. They’ve had a number of chances to take on the Socialists and win. They could easily have put aside their concerns about the ‘old’ and ‘new guards’ and given their support to their president, the man who made St.Charlie. If they’d backed him in an attempt to dismiss the government and take charge himself, which the entire community advocated (some of whom have been more intimately involved in St.Charlie than Eastwood has ever been), then the nation wouldn’t be in this state to begin with.

Reinhardt has the ability (although perhaps not as much time as he’d like, but that’s to be accepted of 20-something micronationalists) to turn the country around from its long decline since the Alvisi years into a lean, modern nation worthy of the prestige of the late 2000s.

The parallels between St.Charlie of 2015 and the Central and Eastern Europe of 1950 are getting clearer by the day. Out with the old and in with the Glorious Socialist Way of Doing Things.

We have seen St.Charlie implode from its former superpower status to that of a sick and dying patient in a hospital bed. We’re torn between not wanting to see this once iconic nation die, but we don’t want it to suffer any longer.

The mood of the community is that St.Charlie is all but finished, and the Eastwood reforms will go down in history as the last nail in the coffin.

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